URBAN LEGEND: Was Fred Astaire a skateboarder?
ANSWER: Yes indeed!
Fred Astaire was more than his generation’s most widely acclaimed dancer. Always up for new challenges, and a man who clearly loved to move, he took up skateboarding after he finally retired from dancing.
Astaire was awarded a Lifetime Membership to the National Skate Board Society of America — he brought name recognition to the sport which was not then the worldwide phenomenon it is today. He took up skateboarding with his grandchildren, and he was quite good at it. At seventy-eight, he broke his left wrist while skateboarding in his driveway doing a complicated stunt! At the time Astaire remarked: "Gene Kelly warned me not to be a damned fool, but I’d seen the things those kids got up to on television doing all sorts of tricks. What a routine I could have worked up for a film sequence if they had existed a few years ago."
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